Yeah, exactly. Video signals from drones have a hard time getting through even a grove of trees if it is at a distance. You could bump up the video transmitter power, which would help to an extent. Line if sight, without any obstacles, you can go miles on a 1W transmitter.

Signal relays/amplifiers do exist, but I'm not sure if you could fit one on a regular sized DJI drone, which is probably the kind they are using to watch.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, I mean, the DJI drone must have the radio to be sending its own video stream back to HQ, which -- and maybe this is an invalid assumption, dunno what Ukrainian drone tactics are like -- I assume is probably co-located with the loitering munition operator. It looks like that stream is at least as high-bitrate as the munition's stream.

Even if they aren't co-located, I'd assume that they're in a position to communicate with each other.

So all it needs is the ability to pick up the munition's stream, and they have line of sight with each other (necessarily, if one is videoing the other).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Maybe doable with the right equipment. It would require some kind of 3rd party add-on for the DJI drone - that one uses a digital signal, so it wouldn't be able to read the analog signal from the suicide drone out of the box.

I'm not sure how big the amplifiers are for analog signals, but I'm sure with a big enough drone they could get it in the air. This thing for example could probably carry a human lol